


A Guiding Light

by pendrecarc



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Loyalty, Moral Ambiguity, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 16:17:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20343037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: In the thirteenth year of the Great Reforms, the first handmaiden of the Lady Kalli was brought to trial.





	A Guiding Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).

In the thirteenth year of the Great Reforms, the first handmaid of the Lady Kalli was brought to trial.

She was charged with one count of murder, committed by slitting of the throat; three counts of murder, committed by poison (which was in those days a greater crime, as it compounded treachery with cowardice); and an assortment of lesser crimes, from blackmail to the forging of official records to the theft of private correspondence.

The Lady Kalli recused herself from these proceedings and attended the trial and sentencing as a private citizen, citing first her personal relationship with the accused and second the alleged motive for these crimes: the advancement of the Lady Kalli’s standing, and even of her reforms, as a means to the advancement of the accused’s own interests. This recusal was not the first of its kind, but it served as a precedent for maintaining legal objectivity in the decades to come.

***

That is how the histories will read. The handmaid will not be named. It will take generations more of reform before an individual of no rank will be recognized as significant enough in her own right to be remembered by anything other than her relationship with a person of status.

For now, that handmaid—whose name is Ivalu—sits on a bench heaped with fur-lined blankets and listens to the clerk of the court read each charge aloud in his clear voice. She knows him. They grew up on the southern coast, though he left for the capital before she was old enough to bleed. His accent is undistinguishable, now, from anyone else’s in the city, but Ivalu hasn’t lost the guttural consonants and lilting vowels of her childhood.

She's long since lost the shame they once caused her, though. She trained herself out of that when she learned it was better for someone in her position to be underestimated than respected. And it never hurt that Kalli always liked her voice.

Every time she rises to respond to a charge with the words, “I swear to my innocence in this,” it's all she can do to clutch at her dignity under this stern sea of eyes. Much easier to clutch at the furs she’s drawn about her shoulders. That comfort is Kalli’s doing. Not directly; she couldn't help Ivalu now, or would not, and Ivalu wouldn’t expect it of her. But the punctilious regard the court shows for its prisoner’s comfort, the two square meals delivered to her cell morning and night and the hours preparing for this interrogation with a learned representative of the court; not so long ago, those would have been unthinkable for one of her station.

She’s glad of the furs. The great fireplaces lining the walls are piled high with wood, but their heat does little for her, sitting all alone at the center of the court.

When she stands to deny the murder of the Lord Mikale, it’s an effort not to look to Kalli. Instead she keeps her eyes fixed on the central bench in the room, the seat of the Magistrates of the Council. Ivalu thinks of it as Kalli’s place, but today it’s taken by an old man. The Acting Magistrate wears the fine black silver-studded wool with distinction if not with Kalli’s self-possession.

Kalli is in one of the common seats, between ranks of nobles and warriors and the wealthier merchants, and she wears a quilted jacket of plain grey. Ivalu has tried not to look at her, so she doesn’t know how her hair has been arranged, whether it was braided and put up in combs as neatly as Ivalu would have done it herself. That thought breaks down her defenses so she can’t help but remember the evening four years before when they had first discussed Mikale before Kalli’s hearth-fire. Ivalu let down each fine braid in turn, combing out the strands of dark hair with gentle care, knowing she could give her Lady this comfort with the comfort of her listening ear.

“I think I might just push this through the Council, if he would only let me try,” Kalli said, head hanging to the side as much in weariness as to let Ivalu reach the next comb. The undersides of her eyes were bruised with exhaustion, and the fine lines at either side of her mouth were deepened with worry. “But I have tried everything that can be done; reason, pleas, appeals for the soul and future of the nation. How are we to be a guiding light in the darkest months if our courts can make no true claims to justice? Still he digs his heels in.” Ivalu allowed herself a long stroke of a finger along the soft skin behind Kalli’s ear, down the side of her neck to the narrow gap between her shift and the skin of her shoulder. This was comfort, too. Kalli leaned forward to allow it, to encourage it; the shift fell away from her collarbone so Ivalu could see the heavy swell of her breasts beneath, the brown coins at their center pebbling with the winter chill. “Perhaps if he dropped dead tomorrow,” said Kalli, very low, in that voice that could command a court chamber with even its mildest tones. Then she laughed a tired and unhappy laugh. The movement sent a loose but uncombed braid tumbling forward against her throat, its curling strands running down like dark rivulets of blood.

He didn’t drop dead the next day, of course. It was nearly a fortnight before the Lord Mikale was found in a cold and clotting pool in his chamber beside the Council Hall. The capital observed all proper rites of mourning in shock but not truly in surprise. He wasn't the first Head of Council to fall victim to assassination, and there were many who had wanted him dead, for as many reasons.

Ivalu had no need to offer a listening ear that evening beside the hearth. Her Lady sat silent as her hair was brushed out and her robes were removed, and when Ivalu’s gaze happened to fall on the little mirror that sat on her Lady’s desk, she found dark and fathomless eyes staring back at her. But no questions were asked.

She denies the poisonings, too, each in turn: a minor magistrate visiting from the provinces who choked on his expensive foreign wine at one of the better brothels in the capital, who would probably not have drawn much attention from the authorities if a Councilman’s nightly diversions hadn't been spoiled by witnessing the event. A palace chambermaid who attended one of the ranking magistrate’s rooms. The nephew of the Lady Kalli’s late husband, who it was said knew details of that marriage that the Lady Kalli would prefer to remain private. The representative of the authorities draws a sharp but fragile thread between each death and the progress of the Lady Kalli’s cause: the removal of some obstacle to her legal reforms or some threat to her reputation, or the shoring-up of her influence in the capital.

Ivalu denies the blackmail. The letters are read aloud to the court, despite the damage done to the victims to whom they’re addressed, and despite those victims' rank. They will have protested this. But that, too, is Kalli’s doing. Trials are public now, to be conducted in a clear and carrying voice at the height of the sun, not bandied about in whispers and shoved into dark corners. The Acting Magistrate is invited to read each of the letters, to observe the coarseness of the handwriting and consider whether it is what one would expect of an uneducated woman from a village on the southern coast.

He instructs Ivalu to provide a sample of her own handwriting for comparison. She sits tall, her cheeks burning, as her representative tells him the Lady Kalli’s first handmaid never learned to read or write.

So it goes, each charge recounted, denied, and interrogated. She only sits on that bench for a slim fraction of a day, but it feels much longer. When the short-lived winter sun has set the court is adjourned. Ivalu rises, her knees stiff with the cold and lack of movement. Before she is escorted away she allows herself to look for her Lady and sees only the back of her dark and shining head in the crowd.

She lies that night in her cell, wrapped in blankets and furs, the fire dying in her little grate, and wonders which of the maids under her has been raised to her former place and will be lying now on the pallet at the foot of Kalli’s bed, listening to the soft sounds of breath as her Lady slides into sleep. Ivalu wonders if she will rise from the pallet and crawl under the furs, feeling their sleekness against the skin of her throat and face and hands, feeling the way they have warmed against the heat of Kalli’s body. If she will kiss and stroke her way up foot and ankle and thigh, if she will bury herself in the center of that heat even as the fire dies in the generous hearth.

It was always warm enough for Ivalu when the two of them lay in that bed. Now she shivers alone and thinks back on the last thirteen years of Ivalu’s service and Kalli’s reform, on the glances and touches that have passed between them and the words that have not.

The court meets again the next day as soon as the reluctant sun has risen high enough to be seen through the chamber windows. Servants strip layers of tapestries away and throw wide the inner shutters; cold brilliance streams through the panes of precious glass, sent at exorbitant prices from lands in the south. Ivalu blinks in the sudden light and remembers that it is often brightest on those days that are too harsh and frozen even for snow.

Then she turns her attention to the magistrate, who clears his throat and invites the first witness.

It is the Lady Kalli.

She declines the offer of a seat and stands with her soft leather boots planted shoulder-width apart on the white stone. Her jacket is a muted blue today, so dark it is almost black, but between the cut and the fastenings of polished whalebone it could never be mistaken for a magistrate’s official garment. Her hands are clasped loosely in front of her as she speaks, answering every question in that clear voice, trained from childhood on the ancient songs and sagas and turned in adulthood to mesmerizing the court and enchanting the nation. Ivalu looks, when she looks at her, at her hands and not her face.

When asked about the death of the Lord Mikale, she says, “No, of course I knew nothing of it. I could not tell you what happened in that chamber or who was with him. I was closeted with three of his fellow Councilmen and Councilwomen most of that day, and all of them will testify to that.”

When asked about the death of the provincial magistrate, she says, “I met with him two days before his death. I have the letter he sent requesting that meeting, and my secretary has notes of what we discussed. I will tell you what I remember. But I never laid eyes on him after that day.”

When asked about the chambermaid, she says, “I know nothing of her death, and could not swear to you that I ever met her in life.”

When asked about the nephew, she says, “I was not even in the city when he died, and only heard of it when his mother wrote and asked me to take my place in the funeral rites.”

When asked if her handmaid might have ensured these deaths in her absence, she says, “I don’t know.” For the first time her voice wavers. This is enough for Ivalu to raise her eyes, to see the so-familiar signs of exhaustion and worry. Absurdly, _this_ is what she resents. Those frailties are not for daylight and are not for the public eye. They are for soft flickering firelight and for Ivalu alone. Then they are gone, forced behind that bulwark of composure and certainty so when Kalli speaks again, it’s in the voice that bent the Council to her will. “I would never have asked that of her.”

The questioning turns, then, to why Kalli might have wanted to ask it of her, even if she never did so. How each crime of which Ivalu stands accused aided Kalli’s cause, and by it her rank, and by _that_ her handmaid’s own standing and security.

The argument is that Ivalu’s ambition brought her out of a hovel on the southern coast, stinking of fish in the summer and starving all through the winter, to the capital; that she found employment with the widow of a minor lord and saw Kalli rise from relative obscurity to an honored place in the Council’s palace itself; that at every threat to her own security Ivalu clawed her way a little farther toward significance.

That is the argument. Ivalu sees the implications at once, and sees too how they will be turned not against a handmaid who was once a peasant girl from the south but against the First Magistrate of the Council: against everything Kalli has fought for and against everything the nation has won by her efforts. How she will be split open and exposed as corrupt, like the rotting carcass of a seal thrown up on a rocky shore.

Ivalu gathers herself, and then she beckons to the clerk. He rises, leans forward, and listens to the words she drops in his ear.

When next Ivalu stands and speaks to the court, she starts with another set of rote words: “I admit to my guilt in this,” and adds a phrase that was never in Kalli’s reforms: “And I swear to my guilt alone.”

She's careful not to turn her eyes toward Kalli, who is hidden once more in the crowd, but she feels every word land like a blow.

The reforms of the last decade and more have dealt extensively with sentencing. Many crimes once punishable by death now call for a sacrifice of property, or a term spent in the capital’s prisons, or for hard service on the war galleys that raid the nations far to the south. Crimes that would have called for a lifetime of servitude are now punished by public shaming and in rare cases by a public branding. But murder is not one of these, and the sentence of death is administered exactly as it ever was.

They take Ivalu out of the city at nightfall. She wears a thin shift of rough wool stained dark brown so it will show against the ice. Her feet are encased in the lightest of slippers. They will do nothing for her comfort, but they make it possible for her to put one frozen foot in front of the other until the guards are satisfied.

In the summer she would walk out until the waves of the harbor rise up and swallow her (up foot and ankle and thigh; up to the heat of her; up to the hands and face she will never again bury between her Lady’s legs). Here in the dead of winter she walks out onto the ice until the guards fall away, and then she turns and watches them return to the gates; and then she waits for the long dark stretch before daylight to steal the warmth from her blood and the breath from her bones.

She can see the torches up on the walls above the gates, and she wonders whether the guards will care to sit out all night and watch with her, or whether the cold will drive them inside and away from their duty. It doesn’t matter to her, whether anyone is there to witness her death. The only one she wants with her can’t possibly come.

Ivalu stands until she can’t stand any more, and then she sits down carefully on the ice, burying her cold face in her knees. She would like her last thought to be of warmth, so now she lets herself remember without regret: the hundreds, the thousands of times she slipped a score of silver hooks out of a score of silver eyelets, working her way down the front of a black magistrate’s robes. Drawing leather boots off a pair of smooth uncalloused feet, so unlike her own. The fine hairs of Kalli’s legs, soft against her skin; the press of Kalli’s body against her belly and breasts, the quickening movement of lungs (and oh, how her lungs burn in the cold) as Kalli’s ribs expand and contract in her embrace. The press of a leg between her own, the press of lips against hers, the slick _heat_ of that tongue in her mouth and that cunt around her fingers—

She has drifted so deep into the cold and the dark and the memory that she doesn’t hear the sound of movement on the ice, though after a childhood spent on the coast she surely ought to. It’s the sound of her own name that rouses her at last, the name that was neither spoken nor recorded in court, and makes Ivalu raise her head to squint into the light of a pair of lanterns hung at the front of a covered sledge.

She can’t possibly stand. She can’t even understand what is happening to her—even with the dogs making their patient whuffs of protest at being stopped here, in the middle of nowhere—until two hands fasten themselves beneath her arms and forcibly raise her to her feet.

“Ivalu,” says that impossible voice again, and then there are gloved hands against her frozen cheeks and living lips kissing warmth back into her. Before she can speak or even think what questions to ask, she finds herself in the sledge, bound round with furs and blankets. There are tin boxes of live coals pressed against her lap and her feet. She must have wept, earlier, because her eyes are half frozen shut and only just beginning to thaw. When at last she can see and the shivers have slowed from uncontrollable wracking to an occasional tremble, Kalli’s face is there close to hers, soft and dark-shadowed in the lantern light.

She is wearing her magistrate’s black. This is almost the first thing Ivalu notices.

“The guards,” is the first thing she says when she can force the words between chattering teeth.

“I’ve dealt with that,” Kalli replies, soft but firm; and who could doubt anything she says? She reaches up to brush the icy tears away.

“They need to collect a body at daybreak,” Ivalu says. There should be a body shrouded in a brown shift, with too-thin slippers on its cold feet.

“I can deal with that, too. Are you well enough to travel now?”

Ivalu nods. It’s all she can do.

Kalli twitches the thick curtain away from the front of the sledge to call to the dogs, and Ivalu turns her face from the dark and the cold into her Lady’s shoulder. She breathes in the scent of wool and woodsmoke and allows herself not to think.

When the sledge stops again, she makes herself lift her head and look outside. The lantern-light just picks out the edge of the ice where deep blue turns to deep grey. She knows the ice well enough to realize they have come as far as they can together. Any farther and she must go on foot.

Out there, on the frigid water, is the long shadow of a kayak and the dark figure of someone sitting patient at the oar.

“My husband owned a small stretch of land in the south,” Kalli says. Her words float away from her mouth, white in the light of the lantern. “It's a long, dangerous journey this time of year, but when you do get there, you'll find a house on an inlet with good fishing. Not even the servants have lived there for years.”

“You’re sending me away,” says Ivalu. She thinks if she was not so cold, she might not feel it as a betrayal.

“Ivalu,” says her Lady, and her voice doesn’t waver now so much as break. Ivalu closes her eyes. Opens them. The ones looking back at her are still dark, still fathomless, but she thinks she knows their depth.

“Will I see you again?”

“As soon as it’s possible,” she says. Of course it’s a true promise, so far as it goes. She hesitates. “Perhaps I can write even sooner.”

Ivalu would laugh if the thought of drawing that much breath didn’t hurt her chest. Kalli stills, and Ivalu knows they’re both remembering those letters presented in court and her representative’s answer to the Acting Magistrate’s command.

“Ivalu,” says her Lady again, suddenly uncertain. “You do know—I would never have asked it of you.”

And Ivalu stares back at her, her world trembling as though she stands on rotten ice. Not sure of Kalli’s own uncertainty, of what Kalli thinks has passed between them in these last thirteen years of service. Uncertain herself of the truth of what has passed between them.

She opens her mouth.

Kalli presses one gloved hand to her lips. “Go, now—before it’s too late.” What she doesn’t say: too late for what? Ivalu doesn’t ask. Instead she pulls herself out of the sledge and walks into the dark.

***

In the thirteenth year of the Great Reforms, a peasant woman named Ivalu was sentenced to death for love of her Lady. She went out onto the ice and then onto the water in the dead of winter, hoping to survive the journey south, waiting for the day they would meet again.

But that is not how the histories will read.


End file.
